Loving Djinni

Beryll & Osiris Brackhaus

Smashwords Edition

© 2016 by Beryll & Osiris Brackhaus, Kassel, Germany

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the author, except as allowed by fair use. For further information, please contact osiris@brackhaus.com.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It contains explicit erotic content and is intended for mature readers. Also, do not take the events in this story as proof of plausibility or safety of the actions described.

Developmental Editing: 44 Raccoons LTD

Layout & Book Design: Julia Schwenk

Proof: Chantal Perez

Coverart: Natalya Nesterova | natsuki-3.deviantart.com

Cover Layout: Osiris Brackhaus | brackhaus.com

ISBN-13: 978-1519611796

www.brackhaus.com

Blurb:

Left to die in a sealed tomb, David, an educated and good-natured New York arts dealer and part-time forger, stumbles over a old oil lamp. But instead of producing a little light for David’s last hours, it conjures forth a veritable djinni.

An ancient, tempting, puckish djinni, who in David’s company prefers to show himself as an irresistibly handsome, fit and barely legal teenager. Quite literally an incarnation of trouble waiting to happen.

So what’s a modern man to do with his three wishes, when he can literally wish for anything except the one thing he truly desires - to mend his broken heart?

Chapter One

No! For fuck's sake! No!

David dropped his clipboard and rushed to block the guy with the angle grinder.

You are not cutting apart this mural! This is a two-thousand year old Ptolemaic fresco! The inox lacquer isn't even dry yet. What are you thinking?

He was facing a short, swarthy Arab worker in dust-covered jeans and T-shirt who looked at David with a blank, mildly bored expression, noisily chewing his gum. The heavy-duty angle grinder in his hands was just as swarthy and grimy as its owner, but its diamond cutting blade was sparkling new.

Don't you have something else to do? David gestured at the rest of the tomb and the milling workers. We still need to catalogue tons of small items, and I am sure the wrapping crew will be grateful for every assistance.

For a second, it seemed as if the worker considered just shouldering David aside. But then he set down his tool and yelled something in Arabic. David could only make out the name of the foreman, Mustafa, and something like ‘idiot’, ‘obstinate’ and ‘cut his balls off’. He must have understood that wrong, surely.

Why on earth did Egyptian Arabic have to be so different from classic Arabic? David had been so sure being fluent in Classical Arabic would allow him to wing his way through Modern Egyptian. But it had proven a lot more difficult than that, like most things on this entirely ill-conceived adventure.

Mustafa appeared from somewhere deeper inside the tomb, looked at David and the worker and rolled his little black eyes. He was a lot cleaner than his men, but just as swarthy, with a rakish neckerchief tucked into the collar of his shirt to keep the dust out.

What is problem? His English was heavily accented, but at least he spoke something other than modern Egyptian.

David pointed at the mural behind him. It depicted two women tending to a flower garden, an exquisitely beautiful and life-like piece.

You can't have the men cut apart the walls yet. The protective lacquer isn't dry yet, if you cut them now, the damage could be catastrophic.

Catastrophic? Mustafa poked at the wall with his dirty fingers, feeling along to check if the lacquer they had generously sprayed on first-thing was still sticky. What is most bad that can happen?

Apart from you leaving fingerprints on the priceless murals of a Ptolemaic tomb? David almost yelled with indignation. But throwing a hissy fit wouldn't save the artwork, only convincing Mustafa would. If you take an angle grinder to the walls now, the seams will frazzle. You might lose up to half an additional inch of artwork. And when taking them down, you might even crack an entire panel. You can't risk that!

Thoughtfully, Mustafa wiped his hand across the wall once more, forcing David to swallow a pained wince.

I say is dry enough. Mustafa nodded towards the worker. We cut now.

No! Desperate, David stepped in front of the wall, his arms spread wide. I will not allow that!

Mustafa froze for a second, then grabbed David by the arm and pulled him away with such force that he stumbled. The sudden outburst of violence caught David completely by surprise, and he struggled to get back on his feet.

What the fuck, Mustafa? I thought we were thieves, not vandals! He turned around, only to find the foreman weighing a solid two-by-four in his hands like a club.

The grim, determined expression of his foreman made it quite clear what he was about to do.

You talk, talk, talk. So much trouble. We find other buyer.

As he raised his makeshift club, David had the shred of common sense to turn around and run. But he didn't get far.

The two-by-four hit him square in the back and made his knees go out from under him. The second strike hit him in the back of the head.

The last thing he remembered was the sound of a diesel-powered angle grinder starting up.

***

David woke at the rumbling sound of several tons of shifting sand and gravel. Dust and small stones were raining down on him, shaken loose from the ceiling.

For a heartbeat, he was filled with outrage. Ancient sites like this were meant to be treated with reverence and care, he thought. What the hell were those ham-fisted thugs doing now?!

Mustafa had clubbed him down, he suddenly remembered. The very same man he had hired to help him excavate this site.

The sound of shifting sand repeated, only more muffled this time. The air was stifling, filled with dust and diesel exhaust. But apart from the ever-softening sound of shifting sand, it was quiet. Way too quiet.

They were resealing the tomb! Those fucking bastards were burying the tomb with the same excavator they had used to unearth it mere hours ago, sealing it with him still inside.

David sat up in the total darkness that surrounded him and tried to get back his senses. The dusty air made him cough and his head complained about the sudden motion with a searing bolt of pain. He found a blood-encrusted lump at the base of his head. How long had he been knocked out? Quite a while apparently, if they were already done looting the place and resealing it. Why hadn't they just shot him? Then again, maybe that was against their honor. Or maybe they thought it was funny.

Fuck!

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

This was the 21st century! People were not supposed to be buried alive in Egyptian graves anymore!

Well, people were not supposed to loot them anymore, either.

For a moment, he considered banging his head against something hard, but his head hurt enough already. What on earth had he been thinking to enter into a deal with some shady-looking Arab ‘businessmen’? Granted, they had seemed trustworthy enough to excavate and clean out a previously unknown Ptolemaic tomb somewhere in the Egyptian desert north of Port Said. For a semi-legal arts dealer like him, that had seemed good enough. And it wasn't as if he had many options from which to choose. Or much experience in this regard. But this tomb had sounded almost too good to be true. Nothing too important, no gilded royalty, but good enough to be worth something. Real antiques of this period were rare enough – made legal by his papers, they would have been worth millions.

Fuck!

Blinking helplessly into the darkness, David decided he had to do something. He couldn't just sit there and wait until he died of dehydration or asphyxiation. First, he needed light. When he'd entered the tomb, he had been carrying a small LED flashlight. A quick search of his pockets made him sigh in relief. He still had it.

Switching on the tiny device, David scanned the room, hoping that he would be able to find something useful. But Mustafa and his men had done a thorough job. He began a quick search of the other chambers of the tomb. They had taken everything but the dust. He really had been unconscious for long while.

He shouldn't have been surprised, though, David told himself. He was so far out of his comfort zone that the outcome should have been clear the moment he had boarded the plane to Cairo. He hadn't come here for the treasures, or the thrill of an easy art theft, at least not primarily so. Despite his slightly criminal leanings, he had always played it as safe as possible. He was used to sitting between books and easels. He worked from home, preferably in his pajamas, and it had always turned out well for him. No, the reason he had taken such stupid risks had a name and a handsome, smirking face.

Stanley's face.

The tall spectre of his ex rose in his mind's eye, telling him how boring he was, that he never took any risks, that he was a pathetic nerd and nothing like a real, red-blooded man like Stanley. That he was just a mousy historian and no match for him.

So when Luigi, David's main contact for questionable finds in Northern Africa, had called and mentioned this new, illegal dig site, he had hopped on the first plane to Egypt. Luigi didn't even have to resort to his oily charms to convince him, and had been mildly miffed because of it. But he just had to check out this site for himself. His life was adventure-filled, and dangerous and exciting even if Stanley didn't see it. So maybe by going to Egypt and getting his hands dirty, David could make him see. Make him understand.

Make him come back.

On his way from Cairo to Port Said, David had even bought a ridiculous brown fedora that he thought made him look like Indiana Jones.

The hat was missing, now, he noticed in silent defeat. Maybe Mustafa had taken a liking to it. David realized his smartphone was missing as well. Not that he would have had any service here in the desert, buried under tons of sand and rock, but maybe rescue crews could have located it. If there were any rescue crews.

Probably not. David had taken great care to make sure no one knew where he was going.

Oh, he had pictured it all – how he would return to New York City with his haul of priceless, unrecorded antiques, how he would meet Stanley at one of those classy, informal sales parties where people talked in hushed tones no louder than the tinkle of the icecubes in their glasses, how he would casually drop some hints on how he had acquired his new merchandise. How Stanley would be so impressed. How Stanley would see that he wasn't boring after all. How their eyes would meet for a long, long moment before Stanley would smile and ask David if they could hook up again.

In his fantasy, he had declined haughtily, but who was he kidding? Of course he would have fallen all over himself to be with Stanley again.

He was so fucking pathetic.

And everything had looked so good in the beginning. Yes, he had taken a gamble with this tomb, by coming here in person, by hooking up with Mustafa and his shady crew. But the moment he had stepped inside, he had known that he had hit the motherlode. He was pretty sure it was a tomb of some middle-class official of the Ptolemaic dynasty, roughly from the beginning of the Common Era. It didn't hold any particular riches, but that wasn't what he had been after anyway.

His business was art, of any kind, of any age. Preferably old, unknown and cheaply acquired. He would be able to forge the papers that turned them into cheap contemporary copies for the customs officials and then other papers to make them legal again, ready for resale at stupendous prices. The content of this tomb would have been perfect – nice enough to bring in money, not so flashy as to draw too much attention. It would have made him a fortune.

Instead, he was now stuck under tons of sand in the middle of nowhere.

On his search for something useful, David reached the entrance room. Sand and gravel had spilled through the broken door and filled half the room. He couldn't hear any more sounds from the workers outside. He was well and truly sealed in.

Thoughtfully, David stared at the wall of sand in the small cone of light in front of him. Merely looking at all the dust in the air made him cough again.

Great, probably he would choke on some kind of toxic spores before he found out whether the oxygen would last long enough for him to die of thirst.

How could he have been so stupid not to see that he was the entirely expendable part of their plan? Once he had checked the tomb and declared it was the genuine article, they didn't need him anymore. When he started annoying them more than his expertise was worth, he had sealed his own fate.

Continuing his tour, David noted what a truly comprehensive job they had done of stripping the place of any valuables. All murals had been professionally dismantled, cut into portable slices and hauled off site. Despite his concerns, it looked as though they had managed to do so without any major losses. In the chamber with the flower garden mural, the diesel exhaust was still strong enough to cause another coughing fit.

Fuck.

The tomb had been build when Egypt had already been a Roman province under the last line of Pharaohs. Untouched graves of that period were rare, and even though it wasn't a royal tomb, David would have given his left arm for the chance to study it. There was so much they could learn about that period from a complete set of burial offerings. And if he managed to find out who had been buried here all those years ago, it would tie all that together. The find of the century. Even all the money he could have earned would mostly have been a nice side benefit to him.

But there really was no point in lamenting the loss now, was there? He had thoroughly fucked this one up, and now he had much more pressing problems. Like how to survive the next few days. And get out of this very thoroughly sealed tomb. And then back to civilization. Through the unforgiving desert. On foot. With no provisions or water.

Why was he still lying to himself? There was pretty much no chance he was going to get out of this alive.

David's flashlight began to flicker.

Great, just great. So he wouldn't even see anything when he died. Fucking cheap piece of shit.

In the dying light of his lamp, he noticed a dark heap in one of the corners. Probably the remnants of one of the chests that had not survived the centuries, filled with rotted cloth or parchment. Carelessly turning over the mouldy remnants, he mused about what on Earth he thought he could find in this garbage pile that would be of any use to him. But then, his foot turned over some dark, crumbling layers of dirt and revealed a dull metal gleam.

Intrigued, he crouched down, brushed away the dust and then blinked in surprise. It was an old-fashioned, brass oil lamp, probably Middle Eastern, and from around 1,000 BCE, judging by its ornaments and archaic Hebrew decoration. That thing had been a thousand years old already when it had been buried in this tomb! For a moment, David wondered if it would take another thousand years for someone else to stumble across his corpse.

But considering the fading light of his torch, that oil lamp might prove a blessing. It felt heavy enough to contain some oil even after all this time. David quickly patted down his pockets again and found his lighter. Maybe he hadn't really thought this whole expedition through, but at least he had packed some useful things.

The wick stubbornly refused to catch fire. Probably too crusted over, too dirty.

He put down his pathetically flickering flashlight and tried to get rid of some of the ancient grime that encrusted the lamp's nozzle, trying to free the wick, using his jacket's sleeve to scrub off the worst.

When he heard the hissing sound, at first, he thought more sand was falling into the tomb, its structure weakened by the damage his traitorous collaborators had done to the walls.

But with the last light of his torch, David saw fine mist emerging from the lamp. It built up to a dense cloud, hovering in the air in front of him. What the fuck?

The mist coalesced into the shape of a square-jawed Roman legionnaire, roughly David's age, who stared at him grimly, his arms imperiously crossed over his chest. The batteries of in David's flashlight finally died and complete darkness engulfed him.

Great, David thought with a hysterical fit of the giggles.

Hallucinogenic spores!

He wasn't just going to die, he was going to go mad first.

***

Being stuck in a lamp was boring.

Being stuck in a lamp because somebody in the family had a bad sense of humour and didn't pick his enemies carefully was annoying. Playing pranks on humans was fine as long as you didn't pick one who happened to be the most powerful and most vengeful magician of his time.

Having your magic stripped away to a bare minimum by some bearded freak who thought he had some sort of divine mandate to rule the Earth was infuriating.

Being enslaved to grant wishes to any human getting hold of your lamp was degrading.

But being stuck in a lamp for Heaven knows how long with nothing happening whatsoever was beyond all that.

If djinn were able to die of boredom, Sharu would have died ages ago. Hell, if djinn were able to die at all, he would have killed himself!

Alas, that was no route of escape. So he had endured and paced the confines of